Let’s Hear It For The ‘Saturday Night Live’ FOUR-Timers Club!

The back half of this season of Saturday Night Live has been, if nothing else, a comforting reunion of the show’s fondest friends. Scarlett Johansson returned a few weeks ago for her 5th stint as host. Next month, Melissa McCarthy will also join the 5-timers club, and the very next week in the season finale, Dwayne Johnson will host his fifth time. The 5-Timers Club has attained a level of a mythical Mount Olympus for SNL hosts. Once the realm of only the most beloved friends of the show — your Baldwins, your Goodmans, your Hankseses — it’s now becoming more and more populated.

So rather than give you yet another tired re-hashing of the 5-Timers Club (Justin Timberlake is in it! Argue amongst yourselves), why don’t we be a bit more forward-thinking about this: which current four-time Saturday Night Live hosts should we be looking at for the next wave of beloved SNL hosts? They’re not five-timers yet, but their little club is pretty good too.

Louis C.K.

Screencap: Hulu

First Time Hosting: November 3, 2012Most Recent Time Hosting: April 8, 2017

Most memorable sketches: This Saturday, Louis CK will officially join the slightly-less-legendary SNL four-timers club. Louie has become an SNL favorite in a remarkably short time. It’s easy to see why. His kind of everyman schlub act is the perfect canvass for SNL‘s wackier characters to bounce off of. Like the time he co-starred with Leslie Jones as a Sprint employee who gets into hot water for doing a racist impersonation of Jones’s voice.

But Louie’s comedic talents were probably best displayed in the “Lincoln” digital short, where he parodied his own FX show with the nation’s 16th president.

Jonah Hill

credit: NBC

First Time Hosting: March 15, 2008Most Recent Time Hosting: March 5, 2006

Most memorable sketches: Fun fact: three of the four times Jonah Hill has hosted SNL have been in the month of March. (Fun fact? Is that a “fun” fact? I like to think so.) We recently talked about what a great recurring sketch the Adam Grossman sketches have been, giving Hill a reliable character to play every time he comes back. And despite the fact that music rights keeps it off of streaming, the sketch he and Kristen Wiig did where they start singing Coolio’s “See U When U Get There” was a classic moments of barely holding it together. But it’s always going to be “Liza Minnelli Tries to Turn Off a Lamp,” isn’t it?

Cameron Diaz

First Time Hosting: September 26, 1998Most Recent Time Hosting: November 22, 2014

Most memorable sketches: With four hosting gigs across the span of 16 years, Diaz has straddled a few different eras. She’s managed to parody two eras of girl groups, from the Spice Girls in ’98 (“If you’re pregnant, no drinking after 8pm”) to the Kate McKinnon/Aidy Bryant-led “Ya Girls” who performed “Back Home Ballers.”

Still, her all-time best sketch might just be “Jingleheimer Junction,” where she played a cast member in a children’s show alongside Will Ferrell, Horatio Sanz, and Ana Gasteyer, all of whom seemed very invested in spelling out curse words.

Dana Carvey

First Time Hosting: October 22, 1994Most Recent Time Hosting: February 5, 2011

Most memorable sketches: Former SNL cast members have a pretty solid inside-track to recurring hosting gigs, though the flip side of that coin is that they are never nearly as memorable in their return gigs as they were when they were there every week, crafting beloved characters like, say, the Church Lady and Garth Algar. In fact, Carvey’s best post-cast-member moment on SNL may have come last year when he returned for a cameo as the Church Lady to interview Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

Paul Simon

First Time Hosting: October 18, 1975Most Recent Time Hosting: December 19, 1987

Most memorable sketches: Paul Simon always gets brought up in the midst of five-timers discussion because he’s currently a four-timer with an asterisk. There are few people more ensconced in SNL lore than Simon, who hosted the second-ever episode of the show and has appeared as a musical guest many, many times, most memorably on the show’s first episode back after 9/11. But he’s only been an official Saturday Night Live host four times. Isn’t it time to make that an official 5 and remove that asterisk once and for all?